Göring entrusts Heydrich with Jewish emigration

On 24 January 1939 Hermann Göring, Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan and, since November 1938, coordinator of the Reich’s entire anti-Jewish policy, sent a letter to the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick. It opened with the sentence: “The emigration of the Jews from Germany is to be promoted by all means.” Göring ordered the creation within the Interior Ministry of a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Reichszentrale für jüdische Auswanderung) and placed at its head the chief of the Security Police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich. From that moment, forcing the Jews out of the Reich ceased to be the business of many competing party and state agencies and became the task of the SS and police apparatus.

Popular chronologies place this event on 24 January 1940 and describe it as entrusting Heydrich with the “solution of the Jewish question”. The year is wrong: Göring’s order is dated 24 January 1939, and no similar decision was taken in January 1940. The phrase about the “solution of the Jewish question”, meanwhile, comes from a later letter from Göring of July 1941, which referred back to this very order of January 1939 – and the one grew directly out of the other.

After Kristallnacht

Until the autumn of 1938 the Third Reich’s policy towards the Jews was chaotic. It was handled by the ministries of economics, finance and the interior, the party, Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine, the Gestapo and the SS Security Service. All pursued the same goal: to push the Jews out of economic life and out of the country. Since 1933 there had been boycotts, dismissals, the Nuremberg Laws and an ever higher Reich Flight Tax; the Haavara Agreement allowed some emigrants to take the remnants of their property to Palestine in the form of German goods. Leaving, however, was expensive, and other countries’ borders were ever more tightly closed. In July 1938 the Évian Conference showed that almost no state was willing to take in larger numbers of refugees.

Vienna became the Nazis’ model. After the Anschluss of Austria, Adolf Eichmann of the SD set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration there in August 1938. All the offices needed for departure were gathered in a single building, and the emigration of the poor was paid for out of the assets of the better-off and with foreign currency sent by Jewish organisations abroad. Within a few months tens of thousands of people had left Austria, robbed of almost everything.

The turning point came in the autumn of 1938. At the end of October the Gestapo threw more than ten thousand Jews with Polish passports across the Polish border (the Polenaktion); the family of one of them, Herschel Grynszpan, was among those expelled, and he himself shot a German diplomat in Paris. Hitler and Goebbels used the attack as a pretext for Kristallnacht. On 12 November Göring called a meeting at which a one-billion-Reichsmark “contribution” was imposed on the Jews and it was decided to eliminate them from the economy entirely. There Heydrich set out his aim: to drive all Jews out of Germany through a central office modelled on the Viennese one. Göring also announced that if the Reich became involved in a foreign conflict, there would be a “great settling of accounts with the Jews”. From then on, policy towards the Jews was to follow a single track, under his authority.

The order of 24 January

The order of 24 January 1939 put those announcements into effect. Formally the Reich Central Office was to be set up within Frick’s ministry, with representatives of the agencies concerned. Göring gave it three tasks. First, to prepare for increased emigration: to create a “suitable Jewish organisation” to handle applications to leave, to raise money for emigration at home and abroad, and to identify destination countries. Second, to send out poor Jews first. Third, to speed up individual cases by processing certificates, passports and permits centrally.

Its direction was entrusted to Heydrich, who at once treated the Central Office as his own agency. On 30 January he sent the ministries, including Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, a letter stating that he was in charge of emigration policy and that the other agencies would merely be represented on a committee. Day-to-day business was taken over by Heinrich Müller, one of the heads of the Gestapo. The Central Office met for the first time in February and began operating in Berlin in March; according to surviving reports, it initially received some two hundred applications a day.

In the same order Göring appointed his official Helmut Wohlthat to negotiate with the director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, the American George Rublee. The plan the two agreed at the beginning of February provided for the departure of several hundred thousand Jews over a few years, financed by a trust fund based on part of the confiscated Jewish property and by foreign loans, while the elderly and those unable to work would remain in Germany. A few days earlier, on 20 January, Hitler had dismissed Hjalmar Schacht, who had begun these negotiations in December, as president of the Reichsbank. The Rublee–Wohlthat plan never came into force; in the end the outbreak of war put paid to it.

Coercion and plunder

The Central Office was not a refugee relief agency but an instrument of expulsion combined with robbery. On 25 February Heydrich ordered that emigrating Jews hand over part of their assets to pay for the departure of the poor, shifting the costs onto the persecuted themselves. The “suitable Jewish organisation” was created on 4 July 1939: the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, to which everyone the Nazis classed as a Jew belonged by law. It remained headed by Rabbi Leo Baeck, who since 1933 had led the Reich Representation of German Jews, but the organisation was under Gestapo supervision. At the end of July 1939 Eichmann set up a branch of the Central Office in Prague, in the Czech lands occupied in March.

In 1939 more Jews left the Reich than in any previous year. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, some 77,000 people left Germany and Austria that year, and in all, since 1933, some 282,000 had left Germany alone and 117,000 Austria. At the end of 1939 around 202,000 Jews still remained in Germany and around 57,000 in Austria – mostly the elderly and the poorest, for whom there was nowhere left to go. Those who had fled to France, Belgium, the Netherlands or the Czech lands soon found themselves under German rule once again.

From emigration to the “Final Solution”

Six days after Göring’s order, on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler declared in the Reichstag that if a new world war broke out, its result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. In January 1939 the Reich’s policy was still one of expulsion, but the apparatus that was to carry it out was now in the hands of Heinrich Himmler and Heydrich, and it was this apparatus that later carried out the subsequent stages of persecution.

After the invasion of Poland the Central Office, together with the Gestapo and the SD, became part of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), and in October 1939 Eichmann took over its affairs. His section, housed on Berlin’s Kurfürstenstraße (PL), first organised deportations of Jews and Poles to the occupied Polish territories, then worked on a plan to ship the Jews to Madagascar, and from the autumn of 1941 on deportations to the killing sites. The branches built for emigration in Vienna, Prague and, from 1941, Amsterdam were turned into deportation offices. In October 1941 Jews were forbidden to leave the Reich.

On 31 July 1941, a few weeks after the invasion of the USSR, Göring signed a letter drafted in Heydrich’s office: “Supplementing the task already assigned to you by the order of 24 January 1939, to solve the Jewish question by way of emigration or evacuation in the most favourable manner possible under present conditions, I hereby instruct you to make all necessary organisational, practical and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” Heydrich invoked this authorisation in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference. The order of 24 January 1939 was not yet a decision to murder, but it was this order that made Heydrich the man responsible for the “Jewish question”, and it was this order that was cited when expulsion turned into the Holocaust.